Genealogical Analysis of Discourse on Ethnic Minority Protests and Its Manifestation and Reinforcement in News Media and State-Sponsored Art

Abstract

This dissertation uses three corpora to explore the official discourse that frames ethnic minority protests in China. It begins by exploring the diachronic changes in characterizing such protests and traces the genealogy of the Chinese discourse of terrorism. It also investigates the conditions which enabled or in some cases precipitated the discursive shifts and discusses the implications of these changes in terms of how the protests were understood and handled by the Chinese government and how the identities of protestors were constructed. After historicizing the current discourse of terrorism as driven by Islamic extremism, the research then moves on to analyzing the manifestation and reinforcement of this discourse in news media and state-sponsored art. Specifically, I examine how only the violent incidents that involve a particular ethnic minority group are identified as acts of terrorism in official news in China and focus on how the state-owned newspaper Global Times employs different discursive strategies to constitute divergent representations of the same incidents in its Chinese and English language versions. I demonstrate that even though these two versions of the same news appear to be guided by different ideologies and/or different journalistic commitments and practices, they are both directed by the shared ideology of legitimating the rule of the Communist Party in the eyes of their respective audiences. This study also looks at the manifestation and reinforcement of the dominant discourse of terrorism in state-sponsored cultural events and artifacts. Focusing on the visual representations of key components of the terrorism discourse in award-winning peasant paintings and other propaganda materials, various metaphoric frames are identified in the data and discussed in terms of their contributions to constructing particular understandings of the ethnic tension and violent incidents, their causes, proper responses, and how to prevent them. Specifically, the study considers the binary representation of Uyghur people as belonging to either of the two mutually exclusive identity categories of GOOD UYGHURS and BAD UYGHURS and the implications of such a dichotomous construction on the conflict between the Chinese government and ethnic minority persons.